Inside the decades-old mystery of Hattie McDaniel's missing Oscar

In late September 2021, the Academy Museum of Motion Pictures opened its doors.

The Los Angeles museum — a years-long effort by The Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences — was designed as a love letter to film filled with artifacts devoted to the history, science and cultural impact of the industry.

One exhibition, the Academy Awards History gallery, debuted that day, luring visitors to its gleaming golden rotunda lined with a semicircle of 20 glass-encased Oscar statuettes.

Each statuette represents a different important Academy win — Clark Gable's best actor award for the 1934 hit "It Happened One Night," Sidney Poitier's historic best actor award for 1963's "Lilies In the Field," Richard Edlund's 1978 Oscar for "Star Wars'" visual effects.

But among the opulent room's ode to cinema, one glass case sits empty.

Its placard indicates that the case is reserved for Hattie McDaniel's Academy Award for her supporting role of Mammy in 1939's Civil War-era epic "Gone With the Wind." McDaniel, who lived in Fort Collins for part of her childhood, made history when she won the Oscar, marking the first Academy Award ever won by a Black performer.

And, for at least the last half century, it's been missing.

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What we know about Hattie McDaniel's Oscar

You're probably picturing one of those tall, gold-plated Oscar statuettes right now.

That's what typically comes to mind when talking about the Academy Awards — images of proud actors and directors hoisting them up before launching into their acceptance speeches.

But in 1940, when Hattie made history by winning her Oscar at the 12th Academy Awards, the award for supporting actors and actresses was instead a plaque fixed to a small base with a molded image of a miniature Oscar and a description of the award, according to a 2012 research paper about the missing Oscar penned by W. Burlette Carter, a professor at The George Washington University Law School.

When Hattie was handed her Oscar that February night more than 80 years ago, she placed it on the lectern in front of her as applause filled the Cocoanut Grove night club at the Ambassador Hotel.

"This is one of the happiest moments of my life," Hattie proclaimed to the crowd, her voice beginning to break. "I shall always hold it as a beacon for anything that I may be able to do in the future ..."

Then she left the stage, ultimately returning to her small table at the back of the banquet room where she, her escort and agent were relegated away from the event's white guests.

The next year, when she moved into a Mediterranean mansion in L.A.'s Sugar Hill neighborhood, Hattie's Oscar moved with her. Decades later, the children of Hattie's secretary, Ruby Goodwin, still remembered seeing it there — tucked away in room where the actress kept items of great importance, they told Hattie's biographer Jill Watts.

When Hattie died of breast cancer in 1952, she left her Oscar to Howard University. While it did ultimately end up on display in the school's department of theater arts, the university has no official records of its receipt, according to Carter's research. Howard University did not respond to the Coloradoan's interview requests for this story.

Piecing together its path using probate records and annual university reports, Carter surmised that the award may have taken a roundabout and years-long journey to the school — possibly showing up among several items gifted by actor and one-time Howard University law student Leigh Whipper around 1960.

Whipper, a career actor on stage and screen, reportedly knew Hattie and had roles on two episodes of "The Beulah Show," a radio program Hattie starred in from 1947 until her death, Carter wrote. He was also committed to preserving the history of Black theater, she said.

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The school year after Whipper's donation — which included, according to department of theater arts' 1960-61 annual report, 200 music scores, "a plaque" and the bronzed tap shoes of famed Black entertainer Bill "Bojangles" Robinson — Hattie's Oscar and Robinson's shoes were reportedly put on display together in a glass case in the drama department's "green room," according to Carter's research.

While Carter speculates this gifted plaque could have been Hattie's unassuming Oscar, Whipper's granddaughter Carole Ione Lewis told the Coloradoan her grandfather had many plaques in his New York City apartment.

Still, "it's possible," Lewis said about Carter's theory that her grandfather somehow came into possession of Hattie's Oscar and later donated it to Howard University. "It's completely possible."

"If he had it, let me tell you, he would have given it to them," Lewis said.

No matter how it got there, the Oscar did ultimately end up at Howard University. And it's there that the real mystery begins.

The mystery of Hattie McDaniel's missing Oscar

Ready for the rumors?

That's all there really are now — rumors and theories about what could have possibly happened to Hattie's Oscar.

While it's never been confirmed exactly when and how the Oscar went missing, nobody has reported seeing it in at least the last 50 years. In 1992, "Jet" magazine reported that Howard University officials thought the Oscar could have been stolen or removed for safe keeping during student protests at the school in the 1960s.

That soon became the prevailing theory, with one student even being rumored to have thrown it into the Potomac River in protest of the racist depictions of Black Southerners in "Gone With the Wind."

Carter found no documentation or proof of these claims but instead found student accounts that indicate the Oscar remained at Howard University into the early 1970s. A former student also told Watts they remembered seeing it atop a filing cabinet at the school.

With little else to go on, Carter turned to the account of a graduate student who was working in the Howard University art department in 1973. A package arrived at the department one day that year. Inside was a pair of bronzed tap shoes once belonging to Bill "Bojangles" Robinson. The donor? Leigh Whipper, who was then well into his 90s.

Carter suspects these could have been a second pair of bronzed shoes Whipper donated to Howard — the first pair being those he gifted among a vaguely described plaque and 200 music scores circa 1960.

With the first pair of donated shoes also unaccounted for — like Hattie's Oscar — Carter surmises that Whipper could have sent this second pair as a replacement for the first pair that had gone missing.

"Whipper could send a replacement pair of shoes," Carter wrote. "He could not send a replacement Oscar."

Lewis said she thought this theory was a bit more far fetched, noting that her grandfather gave away a lot of memorabilia as he got older and he could have sent the additional shoes for that reason.

After half a century of unknowns, the lack of information or updates surrounding the Oscar's disappearance deepens its mystery, said Kevin John Goff, Hattie's great-grandnephew.

"After all this time, it hasn’t showed up on eBay," Goff said. "It could be laying at the bottom of the Potomac River. It could be in a box somewhere in a warehouse and nobody knows what it is."

The meaning behind McDaniel's Oscar

Growing up in Texas, Goff said he knew very little about his great aunt Hattie — let alone the whereabouts of her historic Academy Award.

As a kid, he would sneak into his mother's living room to watch classic films that came on during a special midnight program. The black and white movies featured Hollywood stars like Clark Gable and Henry Fonda.

It wouldn't be until years later — when Goff was visiting his dad for a several-month stay in L.A. as a teenager — that he'd learn of his family's own history on the big screen. His father, Edgar Goff Jr., was a family historian of sorts and told Kevin stories of the McDaniel siblings, including Kevin's great-grandmother Etta, his great-granduncle Sam and his great-grandaunt Hattie.

The siblings were all entertainers and, after moving from Kansas to Colorado with their parents — including a two-year stint in Fort Collins when Hattie was in grade school — the trio landed in Los Angeles, where they ended up acting in hundreds of films and television shows from the 1930s into the 1950s.

After learning more about the McDaniels, Kevin said his teenage self soon discovered a new appreciation for the movies he loved as a kid.

"Now I’m looking at those same movies and I’m noticing that these Black performers I was watching 10-plus years before were actually my relatives. I was watching Sam (McDaniel), I was watching my great-grandmother Etta. It was starting to come into focus how big of a part they played in early Hollywood."

Before coming to Hollywood, Hattie had forged a career as a blues singer, but once in L.A., "she had to temper" the critiques on racism she had previously been able to make in her music, said Watts, a history professor who threw herself into Hattie's world to write the 2005 biography, "Hattie McDaniel: Black Ambition, White Hollywood."

If you were a Black actor in Hollywood in the early to mid-20th century like Hattie and her siblings, "you were a maid, a porter – roles that were subservient and dumbed down and demeaned,” Goff said.

"There was only so much room for her to operate (in)," Watts said, noting Hattie was largely limited to playing maid roles. "But she likes to push the envelope. She has to work the roles she's given, but she does attempt to break down those barriers."

It's this acting approach that ultimately led Hattie to her Oscar-winning portrayal of Mammy — a no-nonsense house servant in "Gone With the Wind's" Civil War-era South. While the film drew objections over its glorification of slavery, and according to Watts' biography of Hattie, "sealed her public image as a key agent in the perpetuation of Hollywood racism," Hattie's Oscar win was also widely celebrated as the major achievement it was.

"There were a lot of great films released in 1939," Goff said, listing off the year's other Oscar contenders "The Wizard of Oz" and "Wuthering Heights."

"There were a ton of odds against her winning the Oscar, but it happened, and I think that makes it monumental,” Goff added.

After Hattie became the first Black Oscar winner in 1940, it would take nearly 25 more years before Sidney Poitier made history as the first Black man to win a Best Actor Oscar for "Lilies of the Field." An additional 26 years after Portier's win, Whoopi Goldberg became the second Black actress to win an Oscar for her supporting role in 1990's "Ghost." Halle Berry became the first Black actress to win a Best Actress award in 2002 for her role in "Monster's Ball."

Given the historic significance of Hattie's Oscar, Goff said he's occasionally wondered why the award was never replaced, like some other Oscars that have been stolen or damaged.

Roughly a year and a half ago, Goff said representatives for the Academy told him they were going to replace his great-grandaunt's award, but nothing came of those conversations.

Watts said there was a separate push to reissue Hattie's Oscar after her biography published in the mid-2000s, but its leaders were told the Academy didn't reissue awards if an Oscar is lost while in the care of someone outside of its recipient.

When asked about these efforts to replace Hattie's Oscar, The Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences declined to provide an on-record response to the Coloradoan.

The Academy also did not respond to questions about its policy of replacing lost, damaged or stolen Oscars, citing a need for more time to get answers.

When considering how to commemorate Hattie's Oscar win in its museum, the Academy "felt that displaying its absence would leave a more resonant impact — and be more historically accurate — than creating a replica for our gallery," the Academy Museum's Vice President of Curatorial Affairs Doris Berger said in a statement to the Coloradoan. "Not only does the empty case pay homage to McDaniel's important story and legacy, but it also encourages visitors to reflect on the treatment and omission of so many Black artists across film history."

Hattie's acceptance speech is also part of the museum's Academy Awards History gallery, and her career is featured prominently in the museum’s exhibition "Regeneration: Black Cinema 1898-1971."

Goff was one of the earlier visitors of the Academy Museum when it debuted in September 2021. He remembers seeing the golden rotunda for the first time with its semicircle of historic Oscar statuettes. He scanned them, noticing his great-grandaunt's empty display box.

“I thought, 'Hasn’t she lost enough?’” Goff recalled.

Even so, Goff said he likes to focus more on Hattie’s legacy than the idea of replacing her Oscar.

“There are bigger things to me than that. I tend to focus on her talent, her humanity,” he said.

“She couldn’t go to the Atlanta premiere of (“Gone With the Wind”),” Goff said, referring to Hattie being denied a seat in the theater because she was Black. “She couldn’t be buried in her cemetery of choice, but in the midst of all of that, she was entertaining World War II troops, she was mentoring other performers, she invited people into her home. That, to me, is courage.”

This article originally appeared on Fort Collins Coloradoan: The mystery (and theories) behind Hattie McDaniel's missing Oscar